Since education makes a person more likely to leave your region, how do you justify your investment in human capital?

Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Rust Belt Czar

The Washington Postprofiles the new head of the Rust Belt recovery, Pittsburgh native Edward Montgomery:

Montgomery began his career as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and worked for the Labor Department during the Clinton administration, rising to second in command at the department before returning to academia at Maryland, where he is dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. He also headed Obama's Labor Department transition team.

He has studied many topics, including whether workplace smoking bans reduce smoking by employees, how universities affect local labor markets and whether unions increase unemployment.

"He's not the sort of economist who views these as abstract problems," said Robert Schwab, associate dean of the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences. "This is a field that's important because it plays such a key role in everyone's life -- not just an interesting abstraction. That permeates all of Ed's research."

1 comment:

I was so excited when I saw this. It was in A10 this morning (It appears, that, as of yesterday the Post got rid of their business section and merged it into their front page). His background at UMD should bring an interesting perspective as well.